Status Of Women By Elaine Lawless

3. Female Abject

As examined above, determining the abject is quite difficult since it has abject has many facets and can be found almost everywhere, without being explicitly portrayed as being abject.

Yet, certain groups of people are easier to target as a victim or even perceived as an abject. Women have always fit into the target group of being either excluded, not taken into consideration or being abused physical and mentally without being spared violence.

Since the very beginning of time, women had been put into a specific position where they could not simply escape. Especially religious attempts to “categorize” or match them into a certain classification has a long tradition. Elaine T. Lawless explains in her work that the biblical story

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Using the perception of women being the evil in our world gives justification for men to use violence against women as well as forcing them into a role. As already mentioned, this generalization makes it harder for women growing up freely.

In addition to that, Lawless elaborates that

[…] leaving their violent partners and telling their life stories – women are able to identify and isolate the view of women as abject and identify its dangers, while they simultaneously resist this reading of women’s roles and worth of their own individual lives.

It is rather that the counterpart to white experiences and observations have not been taken into consideration. Claiborne continues by elaborating that “[…] black women, after centuries of alienation and abjection, are still only convenient dark bodies through which others – read here as white, male and powerful – come to know themselves” (29). This is a concrete classification of status and power explained. Black women are always abject and alienated by those who are male, powerful and mostly white. This sub- categorization goes even broader than white women could experience since they are still visible and always there, while black voices often remain unheard and therefore not considered